- Started to identify medical issues and operate toward establishment of medical strategy -

 Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (Osaka, Japan; President and CEO: Gyo Sagara; “ONO”) and AIXs Inc. (Tokyo, Japan; CEO: Kunitoshi Yamasaki; “AIXs”) announced that the Companies have jointly developed an AI (artificial intelligence) system, “MaTCH (Mapping out Trend Changes)” using the AI natural language processing technology owned by AIXs, for topic extraction analysis of medical articles published in PubMed^*. The system has started to be used in ONO's Medical Affairs Department for identification of medical issues in clinical practice and operation to establish its medical strategy.

PubMed is a free medical-related literature database that allows its users to search bibliographic information on academic articles published in major medical journals around the world.

 The MaTCH system is equipped with an AI natural language processing algorithm, a unique topic extraction model adapted to medical affairs activities and trained on all of more than 35 million medical articles published in PubMed. This allows us to visualize an extraction of important topics, ranking of their importance, and relationships between important topics in chronological order, and provides us with a holistic view of important topics across a huge number of medical articles that was previously difficult to read by humans. It also enables us to quickly grasp research topics available up to now, and prevent oversight of clinical issues. We can also expect to find out unmet needs that may be buried.
 By identifying clinical issues based on the results obtained with this system and using them for planning of medical strategies, we expect that the gaps between projects derived from the knowledge and experiences of individual Medical Affairs staff members will be filled, enabling appropriate and prompt medical strategic planning. Furthermore, the system will be optimized through utilization by the Medical Affairs Department of ONO, and then developed for the company-wide use at ONO.

 Under the corporate philosophy of “Dedicated to the Fight against Disease and Pain,” ONO aims to implement corporate transformation in the digital and IT fields, including the innovation of IT infrastructure in anticipation of globalization and the transformation of the drug discovery value chain and will be continuously committed to promoting innovation and striving for sustainable growth through the creation of innovative new drugs.

 AIXs will contribute to society by leveraging its unique and abundant AI-related and visualization technologies to build IT infrastructures with edge technologies and sustainable digital transformation (DX).